Melissa Febos grew up on Cape Cod, as the well-loved daughter of a sea captain and a Buddhist psychotherapist. At 15, she dropped out of high school and home-schooled herself for a year. At 16, she moved to Boston and waited tables while taking night classes at Harvard. After moving to New York in 1999, she graduated from The New School University, spent four years working as a professional dominatrix, and received an MFA in writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her critically acclaimed memoir is WHIP SMART.

William Damon is a professor of education at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. For the past twenty-five years, Damon has written on character development at all stages of life. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association. Damon's recent books include Failing Liberty 101.

Pub Date: Jul 22, 2011

Diann Rust-Tierney and Dr. James Eisenberg on The Death Penalty: Politics, Economics, Race, and Psychologists

Diann Rust-Tierney is the Executive Director of the NCADP. She is an experienced non-profit manager with more than twenty years of public policy advocacy. She manages and directs the program for the organization and its 100 affiliates seeking to change public policy on the death penalty. Previously, Rust-Tierney served as the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project and the ACLU as its Chief Legislative Counsel and Associate Director of its Washington, D.C. During her tenure at the ACLU she was the lead advocate on capital punishment on Capitol Hill for the organization, coordinating a coalition of national organizations on the issue.

Dr. James Eisenberg is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Criminal Justice Program at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio. He has worked on over 200 death penalty cases and thousands of other criminal and civil forensic proceedings. He is a Diplomate and Officer of the American Board of Forensic Psychology and a frequent presenter for the American Academy of Forensic Psychology's Contemporary Workshop Series. He was a member of the American Bar Association's Task Force on Mental Illness and the Death Penalty.

Jeffrey Rubin, Ph.D., is considered one of the leading integrators of the Eastern meditative and Western psychotherapeutic traditions and is the creator of "Meditative Psychotherapy." The author of four books, including a new book, The Art of Flourishing, Dr. Rubin has been featured previously in The New York Times Magazine, O Magazine, SELF.com, Big Think, and The Huffington Post.

Dr. Peter Ditto is professor and chair of the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Ditto is a social psychologist whose expertise is in human judgment and decision making. His research focuses on "hot cognition" - how our motivations and emotions shape (and often bias) our social, political, moral, medical, and legal judgments.

Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist. He is the author of Anger, Madness, and the Demonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity, and has contributed chapters to the bestselling anthology Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, Spirituality and Psychological Health, Forensic Psychiatry: Influences of Evil, and the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion.

Dr. Cheryl Arutt, Psy.D., a frequent psychological expert on CNN, HLN, truTV and Fox News, is a licensed clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, specializing in creative artist issues, trauma recovery, and fertility. She is the author of Healing Together: A Program for Couples, contributor to Mom360 magazine, and a forensic and media consultant.